The mismatched campaign of Liz Cheney

From the start, Liz Cheney’s quest for a Senate seat from Wyoming was ill starred and divisive in the state of “high altitudes and low multitudes,” where all politics really is local, loyalties remain deeply personal and elections for statewide office have the intimacy of a contest for student body president.

Wyoming may be homogeneous — nearly 90 percent white, 80 percent Christian and 70 percent Republican — with a population just slightly smaller than Staten Island’s. But Cheney’s unblushing bid to unseat Mike Enzi, the solidly conservative three-term incumbent, on the dubious grounds that he was too liberal in the tea party era, nevertheless laid bare deep differences. The state is “finding ourselves more and more at odds with each other over social policies, the role of government and the state of family values,” as Pete Simpson, a professor emeritus at the University of Wyoming and the older brother of former Sen. Alan Simpson, whose onetime seat Cheney sought, recently wrote.

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Cheney campaign in 3 minutes

Cheney’s campaign — notable for its vocal (and seemingly newfound) opposition to gay marriage, which soured her relations with her own openly gay sister, Mary — was as ham-fisted as it was polarizing. A University of Chicago-trained lawyer and political appointee in the George W. Bush-era State Department, Cheney had virtually no experience in the policy areas that matter most in Wyoming: public lands and grazing rights; minerals and mining; oil and gas extraction. She made one unforced error after another, from claiming 10-year residency on her application for a state fishing license (she only moved to the state from Virginia in 2012), to opposing taxes on Internet retailers just as local Wyoming merchants were gearing up for the recent Christmas sales season.

In a state that has long prided itself on political civility, Cheney also came across as shrill and strident, tangling bitterly with the local media and roiling the state’s GOP establishment, which was forced to choose sides in a fight it never wanted. The situation got so out of hand that Cheney’s mother, Lynne, told Alan Simpson, himself the son of a former senator and governor who supported Enzi, to “shut up,” by his account.

“The way it was going,” one veteran Republican political aide in the state said, “this would have caused hard feelings for a generation.”

More than 35 years ago, another ambitious young veteran of a Republican administration in Washington decided to leave the Maryland suburbs and head home to Wyoming to make his first run for elective office. His goal was an open seat in the Senate, one already being sought by a popular local politician with deep roots in the state.

“You could do that,” Wyoming’s former Republican governor, Stan Hathaway, told the would-be senator, whose name was Dick Cheney. “You could run for the Senate seat, but if you do, Al Simpson’s going to kick your butt.”

That long-ago advice should have been a warning to Liz Cheney, whose short, unhappy campaign collapsed in just under six months, when she withdrew late Sunday in the face of concerns about the health and well-being of her five children.

“It is not to say that there never were dirty, personal campaigns fought in Wyoming because they did occur,” Phil Roberts, a professor of history at the University of Wyoming writes in his online “Wyoming Almanac.” “However, it was rare when the perpetrator of the ugly campaign actually won the election. Usually, the more civil the candidate, the more likely the people of Wyoming favored his/her campaign.”

In the Cheney family, Mary has always been her father’s alter ego — wry, laconic, live-and-let-live — while Liz has channeled her mother, a tart-tongued, impassioned Ph.D. veteran of the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. “You might have thought you’d heard it rough from Lynne,” one high-ranking official of the second Bush administration once explained, “but wait till you hear it from Liz.”